While moral immaturity will hamper decision making, we explore in Chapter 2 the reality that many good people have lapses in judgement. In fact, it is more often the highly skilled and experienced people who transgress most seriously. How can this happen? The focus of our attention here is not 'those other people', but rather the opportunity for us to examine ourselves through learning about the pathways to ethical disengagement. How could I fail myself and others? How could my own moral compass go awry?

I have not finished the book but I have a feeling I will be blogging about it again, so impressed I am with the contribution it can make to this modern and complicated world. As I flip the pages to see what I have in store, I am particularly looking forward to reading about the Six Components of Ethical Maturity (and seeing how the authors believe mindfulness fits in as a part of this maturity). The Components:

Creating ethical sensitivity and mindfulness

Ethical decision making

Implementing ethical decisions

Ethical accountability and moral defence

Ethical sustainability and peace

Learning from experience

After you read Ethical Maturity in the Helping Professions, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts about the book, and any ideas it provoked. Here at idealawg, I will do the same.

Helper syndrome, pathological altruism--both typically do little good. They make some helper professionals feel an immediate "goodness" but the resulting longterm damage often makes both the helper and the helpee worse off than before any intervention. Pathological altruism can be dangerous.

As the new book [Pathological Altruism] makes clear, pathological altruism is not limited to showcase acts of self-sacrifice, like donating a kidney or a part of one’s liver to a total stranger. The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.

...

Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group, selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating

The advice one hears is often breathtaking in its arrogance. Sometimes it is heard as unsolicited "wisdom" at a dinner party. At other times, lawyers or mediators may brag about what they believe to be valuable guidance they have shared with clients. Many times, the advice is an insult to the person at whom it is directed.

Killing and doing physical harm are grosser forms of violence that are easily seen and understood. However, nonviolence has many subtle implications as well. ...

...

Violence to others

[I]t becomes easy to look outward and begin to focus on others, hiding our own sense of failure and fear under our blazing concern for others. It's almost as if we are secretly saying, "My life is a mess; I'll feel better if I fix yours." If we are not honest with ourselves, we even go to bed with a sense of pride in the amazing things we have done for others that day. We may even feel holy about our arduous feats of self-sacrifice. In reality we are hiding our own sense of self-failure by telling others how to live their lives. When we are unwilling to look deeply and courageously into our own lives, we can easily

Since my last post on helper syndrome, I have been doing more research into the topic, and giving more thought to the toxic lawyer and the toxic mediator. In my research, I read a long article "Wounded Healers" by Thomas Maeder in the January, 1989, edition of Atlantic Monthly. Here is an excerpt for those of you wanting to ponder the darker sides of the helping professions.

Altruistic people, who work hard to help others, should not be suspected ipso facto of harboring ulterior selfish motives. Nevertheless, the "helping professions," such as nursing, charitable work, the ministry, and psychotherapy [and I would add some lawyers and mediators], attract people for curious and often psychologically suspect reasons. Something is a bit odd about people who proclaim "I want to help others"—the underlying assumption being that they are in a position to help and that others will want to be helped by them.

Why do some of these helper professionals enter their line of work?

Such people may be lured, knowingly or unknowingly, by the position of authority, by the dependence of others, by the image of benevolence, by the promise of adulation, or by a hope of vicariously helping themselves through helping others. Though some helping professionals have humbly and realistically perceived that they have something to offer and are willing to accept the

Companies are now also starting to touch on a potentially troubling area: their employees’ mental health. ... [Programs] range from training managers to spot problems to rehabilitating those suffering breakdowns. A growing number of boutique consultancies such as Corporate Psychology and Mental Fitness are also offering to improve workers’ mental well-being.

The fashion is being driven by simultaneous developments in two usually distinct areas—health care and management theory. Doctors report that more than a third of the physical problems they encounter have some psychological basis. Management gurus are also discovering the joys of psychology. Business professors have taken to littering their texts with references to “toxic organisations” and “emotional contagion”. Several psychologists have become

Those questions are considered in the article "The 'Helper' Syndrome" (Tricycle Magazine). I find that pondering the matters discussed in the article is very important for those of us in helping and service professions. At least, I find it extremely enlightening each time I look deeply at what I am up to—and then try to correct once again.

From the article:

When our strategy is to help, when we need to be helpful, this requires that we need to find people who seem helpless, or situations that seem to call for help. It’s true that we may also have a genuine desire to help - one that isn’t based on our needs - but whenever we feel an urgency or longing to help, it’s often rooted in the fear of facing our own unhealed pain. If our basic fear is that we’ll always be alone, what better way to avoid it than to find someone who needs us? If we have an underlying feeling of worthlessness, how better to prove that we’re worthy than by doing good deeds? If we’re trying to avoid the feeling of being fundamentally powerless or ineffectual, doesn’t it make sense to take on the identity of someone who can affect people and outcomes positively through service?

The “helper” syndrome I’m describing is not outwardly harmful. What makes it dangerous is its potential to keep us blind to what is really going on. Yet it’s easy to see how this lack of awareness, multiplied throughout our society, could lead to the social and political chaos that we live in. Failure to work with our inner turmoil - our need for power, our self-centered desire to possess, our fear-based greed and need to control - results in hatred, aggression, and intolerance. This is the source of all conflicts and wars. Without inner understanding, individuals as well as societies will continue to flounder. This is why it is so important for each of us to come back again and again to the practice of awareness.

Many years ago, a client asked me to find an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous and their intervention process for a BigLaw partner who was drinking too much. She knew it was not a fit for him. I began to do the research and entered a labyrinth of poorly-proven assertions about AA and of its stakeholders wrongly saying those 12 steps are the only way - a BIG industry.

Through my client, this partner was put in touch with a non-disease-model therapist Dr. Chad Emrick. The result was excellent. In my investigation, I learned of the work of Dr. Stanton Peel. Our culture tells us that AA is the only answer. Definitely not true. Read what Peel has to say.

I am writing an article on the legal profession's version of the helper syndrome. This syndrome results in a person helping others in order to ease his or her own pain or to ignore his or her own problems. Because of the lack of clarity or self-awareness on the part of the "helper," the results of the helping intervention can often be worse than nothing at all. The service professions frequently attract people who exhibit the helper syndrome. Even for the mentally healthy, the service relationship can be tricky.

A major consideration, and one that should be held steadfastly in the back of every professional's mind, is that the helping relationship is typically asymmetric: people are not on equal footing. Asymmetric relationships bring with them many potential problems, including dependence, resentment, and suspicion. A key antidote to those perils is the client or helpee maintaining autonomy and self-determination in as large a measure as appropriate and possible.

Another key is well-placed trust in the professional. Gerard Lulofs* writes:

[T]he professions are separate from other vocations because they require a relatively high level of systematic theoretical knowledge. This brings with it a market imbalance, because the information at the disposal of the exchange partners is asymmetrically distributed. . . . As a rule, it is the supplier who determines the needs of the recipient, whereas the latter is seldom in a position to assess the quality of the services provided. The most prominent characteristic, therefore, of the professional services market lies in the element of trust contained in the exchange relationship between provider and recipient.

Still another key to effective service relationships, perhaps the most essential, is the professional's mental